Part 6

“Possibly. But there are reasons for believing that it will be beneficial all around. Dad isn’t entirely well. His heart was never in the banking business to any great extent, but just the same, the breaking up of all the old routine is hard for him. A complete change will do him no end of good.”

“You said ‘reasons’, and that is only one.”

“There is another. How much do you remember about my sister, Lucille?”

“Only that she is blind, and perfectly angelic, and the most delicately beautiful child that ever breathed.”

“She is all those things yet--only more so. Do you remember Bert Oswald?”

“Oh, yes; quite well. He is a lawyer now, isn’t he?”

“Even so. Worse than that, he is in love with Lucille, and--er--I’m very much afraid she is with him--entirely without realizing it, you know. It’s a pitiful misfortune for both of them. Of course, Lucille can never marry.”

“Why do you say ‘of course’?”

“With her affliction? She doesn’t dream of such a thing! Herbert has been very decent about it. I put him on his guard last summer before I left Middleboro, and he hasn’t spoken--yet. But a day may come when he will speak, and then, as I have told him, there will be trouble and a lot of needless wretchedness. That’s why I want to get Dad and sister away from Middleboro. If they are not where Bert can drop in every few minutes, it will be different.”

For a time the daughter of profitable contracts did not comment on the plan, but when she did there was a touch of her father’s shrewd directness in her manner.

“You are the most frightfully cold-blooded person I’ve ever met,” she told him. “If you had ever been in love yourself you wouldn’t talk so calmly about separating these two. What if Lucille is blind? There have been blind wives, and blind husbands, for that matter, since the beginning of time. You’re hard-hearted.”

“No,” said David; “I am only trying to be the right kind of a brother--as I have tried to be ever since that black day years ago when old Doctor Brown told us that the little sister would never see again. And your argument falls down at the other end, too. You say, if I had ever been in love myself.... That has already happened to me, Virginia.”

Her laugh was deliciously care free. “And you have never told me!” she mocked. “Does she live in Middleboro?--or maybe it’s Florida. Or have you broken all the traditions by keeping faith with a college widow?”

“No, she doesn’t live in Middleboro or in Florida, and I am very certain she has never been a college widow. It’s only a pipe-dream for me as yet, but some day----”

“Some day she will grow tired of waiting and marry somebody else,” was the brisk retort. “Is she pretty?”

“No; that isn’t the word at all.”

“Beautiful, then?”

“So beautiful that I can’t be with her without going fairly dotty.”

Again she laughed derisively.

“You seem to have all the symptoms, and really I didn’t believe it of you, David. You have always seemed so solid and sensible.”

“I am both,” he boasted gravely. Then in a quick shift to safer ground: “You told me once that you enjoyed going out on the work with your father--is there any chance that you may come to the Timanyoni this summer?”

“Maybe. I liked it when I was out there last year--for some things.”

“And for some other things you didn’t? What were they?”

“I’d rather not talk about them. But there was one thing.... Do you know anything about Powder Can?”

“Less than nothing beyond what your father has just told me. He says it’s a mining-camp.”

“It is worse than the usual mining-camp, or it was when I saw it. It is the only place where the workmen can go to spend their pay, and you know what that would mean.”

“I can visualize it pretty well; whiskey, dance-halls and gambling dens, and all that.”

“Yes. We saw little of it at the hotel; the Inn is quite a distance from the town and on the other side of the river. But once I went there with--with a man. I didn’t know where he was taking me--or us; there was a party of us from the hotel, you know; slummers, you’d call us.”

“I don’t know the man, but he ought to have been murdered,” said David.

“Something like that, yes,” she said. “But that wasn’t what I meant to speak about particularly. One of the places where he tried to take us--only we wouldn’t go in--was a dance-hall. There was a girl at the piano; I could see her from where I was standing on the sidewalk. She was beautiful, David, and it made my heart ache to see her in such a place.”

“You should never have seen her,” said David hotly. “I’ve been trying to imagine the kind of man who would take you to such a place as that!”

“He isn’t worth imagining,” she asserted quietly. “But I was speaking of the girl. She was playing for the dancers, you know, and just in the little minute that we were standing there, a big quarryman broke out of the circle and--and put his arm around her neck. It was horrible. She fought like a tiger, but the man was too strong for her. He struck her ... with his fist.”

David shook his head. “Why are you making yourself remember all this? It’s just painful, and it can’t do any good. It was a shame that you had to see it.”

“That is foolish,” she reproved gravely. “We are not living in the Victorian age, David, and the shame wasn’t in my seeing it. The dancing stopped, of course, and the men in our party, or some of them, rushed in and interfered. The girl was carried out; the brute’s blow had knocked her senseless. She was taken home and we did what we could for her. The next day I went to see her.”

“That was like you, Virginia, only----”

“Only what?”

“I won’t say that you ought not to have done it; you know best about that; but----”

“I had to go, David. There was a--a sort of obligation, you know. She was one of our Middleboro girls. I didn’t know her, but I remembered seeing her as a little thing. Perhaps you knew her; her name is Judith Fallon.”

If a bomb had been suddenly exploded under David Vallory he could scarcely have been more completely unnerved and shaken. They were sitting in a window alcove a little apart from the bridge players, and the looped-back curtains dimmed the lights in some measure--for which he was thankful. But Virginia Grillage seemed not to have noticed his gasping start at the mention of Judith’s name, and she went on soberly.

“As I say, I had to go, and I found that things were not quite as bad as they seemed--though they were bad enough. The girl had lately lost her mother, and she was keeping house in a little three-room shack for her father, a mechanic in the Murtrie Mine. I didn’t see him, of course, but from what Judith said I gathered that he had taken to drinking after the mother’s death. You’d say he must have gotten pretty low, to let his daughter earn money by playing the piano in a dance-hall.”

David recalled the John Fallon he had known; a rough-cast, unlettered man, but a skilled mechanic and thrifty.

“I knew him well,” he said; adding: “There was some trouble--family trouble, I think--before the Fallons moved away from Middleboro. I heard something about it when I was home for Christmas.”

“It’s the conditions in Powder Can,” she averred; “and for those the new work on the railroad is responsible--an army of workmen with money to throw away. Judith, and probably her father, are neither better nor worse than other people with their point of view. It isn’t fair to such people to permit the conditions.”

“I quite agree with you,” he rejoined hastily. “I don’t know how much I shall be able to do, as chief of construction, but from what you have been telling me it is evident that this plague spot right at our doors ought to be cleaned up with a strong hand.”

“Does that mean that you are going to reform things out there, David?”

“Whatever needs reforming, yes; if I can.”

“I wish you might say that and mean it, knowing all that it implies,” she returned, half musingly.

“What does it imply?”

The card players were rising, and there was a sputtering rapid-fire of motors in the driveway.

“That,” she said slowly, “is something you must find out for yourself, if you can--and will. Now I must go. People will want to be telling me what an exquisite time they’ve had. You say you are leaving early in the morning? Then I will say good-night and good-by. The hall man will show you your room. Give my love to your father and sister when you write, and don’t, for pity’s sake, drag them away out yonder to the ragged edge of nowhere!”

IX

Silas Plegg

Powder Gap, a hill-studded basin where the Powder River, leaping down from the high watershed of the upper range, gathers itself for the swift rush to its emptying into the Timanyoni forty miles away, lies like a half-closed hand in a gorge of the Hophras, with the upturned fingers and thumb postulating the surrounding majesties of mountain peaks, and the forested hills and ridges figuring as the callouses in the palm.

At the foot of one of the callouses lies the mining hamlet of Powder Can; once, in the day of the early mineral discoveries, a plangent, strident nucleus of excitement, but--in the phrase of its oldest inhabitant--a “has-been” at the time of David Vallory’s advent, with a few deep shafts and winding drifts out of which day-laborers, unenthusiastic successors of the early discoverers and plungers, winched or wheeled a few monthly car-loads of low-grade ore.

In some measure the Nevada Short Line’s track-changing activities had brought a return of the plangencies. Scattered construction camps with their armies of workmen dotted the basin above and below the mining town, and once more saloons and dance-halls and gambling places sprang up and did a thriving business on real pay-roll money. Eben Grillage’s attitude toward these absorbents of the money he paid out for labor had ever been that of the closed eye. To all appeals for the betterment of conditions in the humanitarian field he had a stereotyped reply: “The Grillage Engineering Company is strictly an industrial proposition. It does not undertake to say how its employees shall spend their time or their money when they are off duty.”

On the summit of a ridge diagonally opposite Powder Can the prospective millionaires of the mining-camp had, in the day of magnificent expectations, laid out a suburb for the future city, and in token of their faith in the future had built a log-house hotel with appropriate cottages. For some years after the collapse of the mining boom the hotel had remained closed; but with the nearer approach of the railroad it was reopened, with a few families from Brewster as the groundwork of the guest structure, and some small sprinkling of tourists to come and go during the season.

For a month or more after his arrival in the Hophra basin, David Vallory saw little of Powder Can the town, and still less of the log-built inn on the top of the adjacent ridge. New to every phase of the track-changing project, he had scant time even for eating and sleeping. At a dozen different points on the new location the work was driving at top speed; here and there bridges in process of construction over the swift mountain stream; numerous hill cuttings where great steam-shovels clashed their gears and chains from shift to shift throughout the twenty-four-hour days; prodigious fills growing foot by foot with the dumped spoil from the cuttings; and, last but by no means least, the projected tunnel under Powder Pass which was inching its way from both sides of the mountain in gigantic worm-gnawings through the granite.

During this strenuous preliminary period in which he was striving to gather the multiplicity of working threads into his hands, David lived in the bunk trains and mess tents, getting in touch with the various units of the laboring armies, and absorbing the details as a thirsty dog laps water. To his great satisfaction he found his staff largely composed of young men eager to make a record; eager, also, to pledge fealty to a chief who was himself young enough to be still in the process of winning his spurs. Plegg, the first assistant, was the single exception to the youth of the staff. He was a man of middle age, and at their first meeting David was struck with a vague sense of familiarity; an elusive impression that he had somewhere in the memory files a picture of the senior assistant’s weathered face, with its clipped beard, shrewd eyes and thin-lipped mouth about which a half-cynical smile played so often and so easily as to become almost an added feature.

“Have we ever met before, Mr. Plegg?” he had asked, at that first meeting; and the mildly sardonic smile had immediately fallen into broader lines.

“Once, Mr. Vallory; on a fine June morning nearly a year ago. It was in a Pullman sleeper, back in God’s country; and, if I recall it correctly, I told you you would go far if you were not too good. You are fulfilling my little prophecy very handsomely; and incidentally we are both proving the truth of that old bromide about the extreme narrowness of the world we live in. I’m glad to have you for my chief.”

It was Silas Plegg who did the most toward helping the new chief in the absorbing of the details, and David Vallory early acquired a great and growing respect for the technical gifts of his first assistant. The organization of the engineering staff, and of the rank and file, was fairly geniusful, the hand of a master being evident in every disposition of the huge working army. David weighed and measured, studied and observed; and at the end of the preliminary month was ready to give credit where credit was due.

“Plegg, you are too good an engineer to be anybody’s assistant,” he said, one evening after they had finished a round of the night-shift activities and had returned to the cramped quarters of the small bunk car which they shared together. “Why didn’t Mr. Grillage give you this job after Lushing quit?”

Plegg’s smile was grim.

“If I were really as cynical as you think I am, I might hint that possibly Mr. Grillage had a young man in his eye whom he wished to give a shove up the ladder. But I’ll stand it upon another leg. Mr. Eben Grillage is an excellent judge of men; and he knows me of old.”

David shook his head.

“That ought to be your very best recommendation. What have you ever done to make him pass you up in the promotion scheme?”

“It was something that my ancestors did--if you believe in heredity. They gave me the qualities of a good follower and neglected to include the saving moiety of leadership--that’s all. But speaking of Mr. Grillage; did you know he is on his way out here?”

David had not known it and he said so. “How did you hear?” he asked.

“Such news always travels ahead of a man of Mr. Grillage’s importance in the scheme of things. I heard it from one of the clerks at the Alta Vista Inn. The big boss has wired ahead for a double suite.”

The double suite could mean only one thing, and David’s pulses quickened after the most approved fashion of pulses in such case made and provided.

“He is bringing Miss Virginia with him?” he queried.

“Most likely. She chums with her father a good bit--when she isn’t too busy otherwise. Ever meet her?”

David Vallory admitted the fact affirmative but did not dilate upon it.

“She is a pretty good little engineer, herself,” Plegg went on. “She was out here last fall, and it was whispered around at the Inn that Lushing had the colossal nerve to make love to her.”

“But that wasn’t the reason why he was dropped?” said David, willing to learn something more of the rise and fall of his predecessor.

“Nobody knows; but it may have had some bearing. Mr. Grillage never had much use for Lushing as a man, but he was--and is--a cracking good organizer; a man who could squeeze a profit out of a job on a bid that had driven every other contractor out of the field. It was a fairly open secret around here last fall that Miss Virginia turned him down hard; and after that he began to sell us out to the railroad company. Basing the notion upon the Inn gossip about him and Miss Virginia, our fellows were not slow to charge his treason to pure vindictiveness.”

David Vallory was wiser now than he had been when he began as a working assistant on the Coulee du Sac bridge.

“What did he have to sell, Plegg?” he asked.

Plegg closed one eye and his habitual smile showed his strong, even teeth.

“Little tricks of the trade,” he answered obliquely. “You are the chief on the job now, and if you don’t know what they are, you can say that you don’t, and swear to it.”

“You mean that we are not giving the railroad company a square deal?”

Again Plegg’s reply took the diagonal instead of the direct line.

“We are giving them all they are paying us for. Of course, they are not satisfied; no party of the first part in a contracting deal ever is. And now that Lushing has gone over to their side of the fence, we’ve had trouble on top of trouble. If you’ll take a word of advice from an older man and a subordinate, you’ll stay out of it. In fact, I think that is what Mr. Grillage expects you to do.”

At the moment, David did not attach any special importance to this remark of Plegg’s about Mr. Grillage’s attitude. But if he could have turned the leaves of the book of days backward to the night of his stay at the lakeside mansion of the lavishnesses, the explanation would have synchronized itself quite accurately with his retreat to his room in The Maples and the departure of the last of the bridge-playing dinner guests.

At the door-closing upon the final couple, Miss Virginia had sought her father in his den. By this time the private secretary had been dismissed and the king of the contractors was alone.

“Hello, Vinnie, girl!” he rumbled. “Come to tell the old daddy good-night?”

“Partly,” was the crisp rejoinder. “But mostly it’s about David. You have decided to send him to the Timanyoni, in spite of my little protest?”

Eben Grillage’s laugh resembled nothing so much as the rasping of circular saws, but he meant it to be good-natured. He could hold no other attitude toward the daughter whom David, in his talk with his father, had characterized as the apple of his eye.

“You women are too much for me, Vinnie. You like David, and you want to see him get ahead. But when I hunt out a good place for him, you suddenly take a notion that you don’t want him to have it. What’s the particular reason?”

It was at this point that the young woman had taken a chair at the opposite side of the broad working table where she sat facing her father.

“If I thought I could make you understand,” she said, half musingly. And then: “I do like David and I respect him. It seems such a needless pity to spoil him, don’t you think?”

“What do you mean by spoiling him?”

“You know perfectly well what I mean. He has his own ideas of uprightness and common honesty--or he did have them before he went to work for the company--and they are the right ideas. How long is he going to be able to keep them if you put him in charge of the work in Powder Gap and make him responsible for all the crooked things that are being done?”

“That’s a pretty hard word to fling at your old daddy, Vinnie. Has it reached the point where you can call your father’s business crooked? If I had known that the colleges were going to put that kind of a fad into your head, they wouldn’t have got any of my money--not in a thousand years.”

She shook the head in question despairingly.

“How often must I say that it wasn’t the colleges. It is in the air. A new era is dawning, if we only had eyes to see and ears to hear. As a people we had forgotten that there was such a thing as an American conscience. Some of us are remembering now.”

“Some few impractical college professors and fanatics are making mountains out of molehills!” was the grumbling retort. “You mustn’t be foolish, Vinnie, girl. Competition is the life of trade, and competition means a fight. If we don’t do the other fellow--within reasonable business limits, of course--he’ll do us, and we’ll all go to the poor-farm.”

“We have been over all that before, many times,” said the young woman, with a touch of weariness in her tone. “I don’t ever hope to make you see it as I do--as I can’t help seeing it--but I shouldn’t be your daughter and a Grillage if I refused to make a fight for David.”

For some little time the grizzled giant in the wide-armed chair made no reply. He had picked up a paper-knife and was absently passing it through his thick, square-ended fingers in the manner of one testing the keenness of an edged tool. Finally he said: “Is David the man, Vinnie?”

She did not affect to misunderstand him.

“There isn’t any ‘the man’ yet. I like the grown-up David, partly because he has kept the promise of the little-boy David, and partly because he is so different from the others. He needs an alert, wide-awake sister to look after him much more than he does a wife. Besides, he’s already in love with--some girl.”

The father’s chuckle was good-naturedly derisive.

“That’s sheer girl-talk--the sisterly business, and the other--and it isn’t like you to try to throw dust, Vinnie. We’ll clear the air in that quarter, once for all. I haven’t any objections. David’s a good boy; a good son of a mighty good father. If he inherits some of Adam’s finicky notions, I suppose that can’t be helped. He’s as poor as Job’s turkey, but I can make him a rich man for you if you don’t insist on chucking too many stones in front of the wheels. You can’t marry a poor man, you know; you haven’t been brought up right.”

It was just here that the daughter of profitable contracts showed her first touch of warmth.

“You have some other reason for sending David to the work in Powder Gap,” she said accusingly. “You know you have always made it your boast that you never mix business and sentiment.”

“Maybe this was one time when business and sentiment happened to trot in double harness”--with a grim smile. “If you’re figuring on being a contracting engineer’s wife some time, you’ll have to throw away some of your highbrow college notions and get down to the practical things. One way and another, we’ve been getting in Dutch with the railroad people out yonder on the Short Line. You know that, don’t you?”

“I know there has been quarreling almost from the beginning.”

“Well, Ford, the president of the P. S-W. system, contends that we have a set of crooks in charge out there--this in spite of the fact that some understrapper of his on the ground has hired Lushing, the biggest of the crooks. Ford knows David’s family, and the straight-backed honest old stock there is in the Vallorys. I’m killing two birds with one cartridge. With Adam Vallory’s boy in charge for us at Powder Gap, Ford may rest easier, and maybe he’ll make it a little easier for us. And, by giving David his boost, I’m fixing it so you won’t have to marry a poor man.”

“I’m not talking about marrying; I’m talking about the soul of a man,” was the quick retort. “It is in your hands to keep David Vallory true to his ideals, or to make him like other men who have one conscience for their personal relations and another for business. David is more loyal to you than your own son would be, if you had one; after what you did for his father last summer he would go through fire and water for you. It isn’t right or just for you to use so fine a thing as his gratitude and make it the means of his undoing!”

Again the big man in the opposite chair fell silent. When he spoke again it was to say:

“You’re all wrong, Vinnie, girl; wrong and a little bit wrought up. You are carried away by your own impossible notions of the golden-rule in business, and all that--things that you know about only by hearsay. You won’t take it amiss if the old daddy has his notions, too, will you? Just the same, we’re chums, little girl, and we won’t fight about a little thing like that. I’ll see to it that David doesn’t have to stick his fingers into the tar-barrel, if that’s what you want. Now run along to bed.”